Modern communication systems offer many types of services to users. For instance, e-mail services, voice communication services, and Internet services are a few of the services available to users of today's systems. Due to the many types of services available, however, some users may not wish to support or respond to all services or service requests at all times. Consequently, many systems allow a user at their subscriber unit to indicate a user preference of services specifying the types of services that they will accept or will not accept. For instance, a subscriber may wish to accept e-mail communications, but not want to accept voice communications. Such user preferences are also typically updated, sometimes frequently and at other times infrequently, depending upon the type of system.
In addition, users may not choose to accept communications in other types of situations. For example, mobile stations typically include memory units. The mobile stations may not be willing to accept calls when memory capacity is or will become exceeded. In another example, a user may participate in a peer-to-peer call or use a type of Radio Frequency (RF) technology about which the system is unaware.
Because of the number and type of services used, many types of systems, including many cellular communication systems, have suffered from having inadequate communication capacities. In these situations, user preferences could be used to alleviate some of the capacity problems by allowing users to accept or reject different types of services.
Unfortunately, previous systems did not adequately alleviate capacity issues, and frequently made the problems worse due to the frequency of updating user preferences. For example, if a mobile station detected that the user was busy, then the user preferences were updated often regardless of whether the preferences actually changed. This frequent updating resulted in the waste of system resources and the degradation of call processing services.
On the other hand, less frequent updating in other previous systems led to other problems. Infrequent updating resulted in the system having out-of-date preferences in situations where the preferences of a target mobile station had changed, but had not yet been communicated to the system. Consequently, a communication channel might be assigned to a call, only to have the target mobile station later reject the service. Inadequate updating of the user preferences also led to frequent re-paging of the mobile station even though the target mobile station would not respond to pages requesting the unacceptable service type. As a result of these problems, the capacity problems associated with the system worsened and user frustration with the system increased.
Skilled artisans will appreciate that elements in the figures are illustrated for simplicity and clarity and have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions and/or relative positioning of some of the elements in the figures may be exaggerated relative to other elements to help to improve understanding of various embodiments of the present invention. Also, common but well-understood elements that are useful or necessary in a commercially feasible embodiment are often not depicted in order to facilitate a less obstructed view of these various embodiments of the present invention. It will further be appreciated that certain actions and/or steps may be described or depicted in a particular order of occurrence while those skilled in the art will understand that such specificity with respect to sequence is not actually required. It will also be understood that the terms and expressions used herein have the ordinary meaning as is accorded to such terms and expressions with respect to their corresponding respective areas of inquiry and study except where specific meanings have otherwise been set forth herein.